


LOST BOYS: OR, NO COUNTRY FOR DIRTY OLD MEN

by Larcenie_Christmas



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Noir, Erotica, Implied/Referenced Underage Sex, Jingle Jangle (Riverdale), M/M, Older Man/Younger Man, Other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-19
Updated: 2021-03-26
Packaged: 2021-03-28 11:27:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30138852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Larcenie_Christmas/pseuds/Larcenie_Christmas
Summary: I have now been threatening to write my erotic Riverdale neo-noir tour de force (feat. Pop Tate/Kurtz) for over a year. My friends, family, and loved ones have repeatedly begged me not to do this in the interest of good taste and sanity. The way forward is clear. Thus, I am now releasing LOST BOYS: OR, NO COUNTRY FOR DIRTY OLD MEN in serial form.Pop Tate is a simple man with simple desires- desires that can only be fulfilled by the lean, hardbodied teenage drifters that he employs and houses in the Chocklit Shoppe in exchange for carnal companionship. It's a lonely life, but a quiet one. Until, that is, Tate crosses paths with a mysterious hustler known only as Kurtz, and his bucolic small-town existence descends into a nightmare of gang warfare, violence, and animalistic jingle-jangle fueled lovemaking.Not especially safe for work. New chapters every week, more or less.
Relationships: Pop Tate/Kurtz





	1. LOST BOYS: CHAPTER I

CHAPTER I

POP TATE

______

The boy is a drifter. All Pop’s boys are. Always have been, for as long as the diner’s been around. Partly a matter of convenience, more so a question of discretion- he’s never been a man to shit where he eats, Pop Tate, nor one to get mixed up in other people’s troubles. Not in a place so stiflingly small. Not in a town already full to bursting with secrets. He sees them, the men who come for hotcakes and eggs in their Sunday best after church, laughing, greeting him by name, placid wives and cooing children in tow; the same men who every Saturday night knock three times on the door of the secret basement speakeasy, hands trembling with anticipation as they press crumpled twenties into the doorman’s palm. Men who come alone and leave with each other, made brave enough by liquor to finally admit their true desires to themselves. He sees the sheriff’s son with a new stranger every week, all of them older than him, too old, and with a predatory twist to their lips when they smile for the boy. How he always sits in the backmost booth, facing the door, ready to run if a face he knows walks in. His father. His schoolteachers. The linebacker and the star quarterback, even though they, too, jerk away from holding hands beneath the table when Pop approaches with their plates of burgers and fries. As though caught in the act of something obscene. Something criminal.

He understands them- the men, their shame, their bottomless, aching need -perhaps a little too well. There was another town, before Riverdale, a time before Pop Tate was Pop Tate. There was a woman. A family. A series of promises that he had no way to keep. There were, above all, consequences. So while he understands the men, he has no sympathy for them. And absolutely no intention of becoming a player in their intricate games of desire and duplicity- he is a simple man, Pop likes to think, with uncomplicated needs. His way is better. The boys blow into town, runaways from Greendale or street rats headed west out of New York City. Low on cash and low on luck, sometimes they try to tell him the sad stories of what brought them here but he does his best not to listen. Better that he doesn’t know. He’s not in a position to offer them any kind of comfort beyond the purely physical, can’t give them fatherly advice or a shoulder to cry on. But what he can give them- what he does give them -is a job. Bus tables, wash dishes, not glamorous work but honest enough. Pays them decent, maybe a dollar or two better than what they’d get at the Denny’s in Centerdale, lets them sleep on the rollaway bed in the back. Treats them decent, too. Offers them a chance to get back on their feet.

What he asks for in return seems by comparison so precious little. And the boys are, for the most part, entirely happy to oblige. It’s easy. Clean. Satisfying and mutually uncomplicated in the way that only a purely transactional relationship can be. A week or two of something soft and sweet and then they’re gone, replaced by the next one. And the next. And the next. It’s gone on like this for years. Will go on like this for years, as far as Pop figures. Why tempt fate and ask for more when he has, after much suffering and ignominy, been blessed with an arrangement that is simply enough? That is, again, so wonderfully, terribly convenient.

And yet. Sometimes, in the smallest hours of the morning, after the latest boy has earned his keep for the night and he’s wiped himself off with one of the spare aprons he keeps in the office for these purposes, when he’s back home with only a beer and the radio for company, Pop is forced to admit to himself that there’s something more than sheer convenience dictating his choice in lovers. A certain look in the boys’ eyes, beneath their punk posturing and their deliberately roughened exteriors they all have a kind of wounded-animal shyness to them, a vulnerability that hints at if never outright announces a hidden tenderness that the cruelty of the world has yet to strip away from them. For all their world-weariness, their cynicism, the way they indulge Pop’s pleasures with a street hustler’s jaded, disaffected expertise, they are still so very, very young. Young and unspoiled in a way that makes Pop’s pulse quicken, he would never be so naive as to call any of his boys innocent but sometimes when he takes them down to the rollaway bed, spreads them out beneath his strong but gentle hands, when he enters them they shudder and gasp and yield to the rolling bulk of his body in a way that allows him to imagine that he is their first. That when he comes inside them, spilling his lust between their firm and supple buttocks, he is marking them. Marking them so deeply that years later, when they lie sleepless in bed next to their wives and girlfriends and mistresses, they will shudder at the remembrance of his touch. At how badly they still crave it. He is a simple man, yes, and a humble one, but Pop nevertheless allows himself a certain amount of pride in knowing that he's never met a boy he couldn’t break.

Until him.

He wouldn’t realize it until later- much later, when he was washing the boy’s blood off his hands in the men’s room, shaking with the effort of holding in his tears, his screams -but what had drawn him so powerfully and inexorably towards Kurtz was not innocence but a complete and total lack thereof. Those dark eyes, hollow and hooded and totally inscrutable, betrayed no trace of emotion, no hint of weakness, less a window to the soul than a one-way mirror. Kurtz had shark’s eyes. Predator’s eyes. When he held Pop in his gaze, steady and unwavering, Pop felt stripped bare, exposed in a way that he hadn’t known since the first time he had allowed himself to be penetrated by another man. He had the distinct impression that Kurtz could see straight into his soul, and held what he saw there in utter contempt. Powerlessness: it had been so long since Pop felt powerlessness, allowed himself to surrender utterly to the heady rush of someone else’s body, someone else’s control. The feeling was intoxicating. Addictive. No wonder that he had been unable to resist the boy’s spell.

It also didn’t hurt that Kurtz had the biggest cock Pop Tate had ever seen in his life by a solid- and he did mean solid -six inch margin. But that, too, came later. First, there is this:

[CHAPTER II TO FOLLOW]


	2. LOST BOYS: CHAPTER II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chapter II arriving right on schedule, as threatened/promised. Still arguably less terrible than what is actually, canonically happening on Riverdale this week!

CHAPTER II: KURTZ

That's what I told him my name was. It wasn't my real name. I learned to keep those things to myself years ago, keep them secret, keep them safe- even before I knew the things I know now, before I came upon the lore and the rituals and the righteous and sublime path of the King I understood that to name something is to hold power over it, to claim ownership. I have never had much interest in being owned. Even by him. Even at the end, after everything. So there were no names between us. I mean, what? Do you really, excuse me, fucking think that his Christian name was Pop?

I don't think you need to know my name, either.

No, I'm being perfectly cooperative, Mr. Keller. I'm telling you these things so you'll understand. That's why you're here, isn't it? So you can understand what happened, and why it had to happen in the way that it did. Because it did. Have to happen that way, I mean, as it was intended and thus doomed to play out. Do you believe in fate, Mr. Keller? It's less a question of destiny than of simple physics if you look at-

Ah. Right. "Sheriff," not "Mr." Of course. How rude of me. Anyways. To return to the original point- your original point -I met him at the diner. 

I had needed a cup of coffee, badly, that particular afternoon. Well. Strictly speaking, what I needed was amphetamines, but the connect that Penny had promised would be waiting for me just south of the drive-in never showed, and after two hours of standing in the rain grinding my teeth into dust my patience was stretched to its limits. Alone in unfamiliar territory with the beginnings of a coldsweat dope headache creeping through my bones, I set out in search of caffeine and a place to think. 

The Chocklit Shoppe, as I remember it, looked so… pleasantly anodyne, that day. Checker tile and cheeseburgers. Tommy James and the Shondells on the jukebox. A couple kids ditching class to giggle over milkshakes. As I slid into a booth, watching them, I had a sudden, vivid vision of what my life might have been, had I not been called to my particular mission, if had never sought an audience with the King- a teenaged idyll of blue plate specials and high school gossip, whiling away my afternoons at a diner perhaps not unlike this one somewhere on Long Island. The bliss of ignorance. It might have been nice, I admit, to forget. Perhaps that was, in some part, what kept me tied to him for as long as I was. He allowed me to forget, and he never asked the questions that would have forced me to remember. Much like my hazyheaded first impression of his restaurant, Pop himself always struck me as something reliable, simple and clean, innocent. A safe harbor from the horror that surrounded me.

Your face- does is strike you as strange, as amusing that I describe him as innocent? I did not misspeak. I had no desire to exploit him, either, though I'm sure he would disagree. I didn't want his money, or his help, and I had no shortage of places to sleep. What I craved was the absolution I felt in his presence, in the blind eye he turned on who and what and why I am. I never lied to him, after the first time, you know. He saw me exactly as I was, and he looked the other way. For someone like myself, this is the best that I can hope for. The closest I can come to being known without being destroyed.

Yes. I suppose I am getting ahead of myself. What it was, was that I ordered a cup of coffee, black, and he said to me, as he poured it, Why, is that how you like your men? And me, cold, soaking wet, bone-tired and exiled to the ass-end of Suburbia on an exponentially thankless mission in my King's name, drawing ever closer to doubting that the mission was even half so carefully orchestrated and watertight as I had been led to believe, teetering on the verge of a migraine of screamingly miserable proportions, I looked into Pop's eyes. His soft and careworn eyes, honey-brown and quietly amused at his own daring, his private joke that he now extended to me. Eyes that were still gentle and somehow unassuming, despite the come-on. His eyes, I looked into them, and I thought:

If this man is willing to straight-up proposition me at one in the afternoon, he will almost definitely be able to give me drugs.

I smiled at him. A very long time since I had smiled last. I was out of practice, but he didn't seem to mind. 

It could be, I said. His own face split into a grin.

That's on the house, by the way, he said. 

And so. That's how it begins, this story. How it ends, well. I suppose you already know that, Sheriff. We wouldn't be here if you didn't. Would we? But there are plenty of things that, as of yet, you don't know. Hell, that maybe even I don't know. Like, oh, for instance- what made you decide to interrogate me…

… when I'm already dead?


End file.
